


Now and Then, Here and There

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Angst, Attempted Murder, F/M, Family, Female Harry Potter, Friendship/Love, Girl-Who-Lived (Harry Potter), Horror, Magical Girl Harry Potter, Master of Death Harry Potter, Nihilism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-20 21:29:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15542532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: At the end of Harry Potter's second year the horcrux of Tom Riddle stored in a diary learns that the world he encompasses is quite small and that real magic is far more powerful and in some ways more terrifying than any dark arts could be. In the eye that is the universe magical Britain is no more than a single photon.





	1. Chapter 1

They said that when the giant Hagrid first said the words, “You’re a witch, Harry.” That she did not cry, smile, or react in any true manner at all. 

Her eyes merely grew wide and her face paled, she seemed to fall into herself as if shattered, and her trembling pale fingers reached up to her face as if to feel the horror imprinted on her skin, “Oh God no, please no.”

However, this was only what they said.

* * *

The first time Tom Riddle saw Harriet Potter it was through the eyes of little Ginny Weasley in the Hogwarts halls. She was smaller than he expected, her thick curling black hair almost larger than she herself was, but her eyes were sharper than daggers and when they cut across to find Ginny Tom almost thought, for a moment, she was looking straight through to him.

Another surprise was that she did not wear the proud gold and red but rather it was a silver and green tie hanging about her neck. This had seemed unimportant at the time.

There was something odd in the way she stood, a sort of stillness that commanded attention, as if no movement was truly wasted and every step was just as deliberate as the last. She looked distant and focused all at once as if Hogwarts was a battlefield rather than a school. He’d remembered seeing her and wondering if he’d ever noticed a girl who stood like that but he’d dismissed it easily enough at the time, because a girl was still a girl no matter how she walked.

He didn’t truly see her in that moment though, she had only been a glimpse in the hallway, and in her he had only seen his own hatred reflected back at him in her sheer indifference.

He’d heard quite a bit about the girl who lived before he ever saw her eyes. When Ginny had found him there had been nothing, only that white expanse of emptiness lingering back at him, and he’d wondered if that was what eternity was meant to be; the dreaded nothingness of his own soul. He’d felt as if he was losing his mind in that place, if horcruxes even had minds to spare, and to keep his fraying sanity he’d told himself of the glory of Lord Voldemort the man he would/had become and sacrificed Tom to be.

Sacrificed, by his own soul, self-sacrifice as it was; there was irony in there somewhere if he had the courage to look for it.

Ginny, little Ginevera Weasley, ordinary and unremarkable as she was had seemed like divine light in that place. With her words he had been blessed with an opportunity and as soon as those first words had been entered into the diary he had known with certainty that he was not going to waste it. He would be free of this self-imposed prison and walk in the world once more and see what his other half had made of it.

He couldn’t help but rush even though he knew that he must be careful, because the end goal was freedom, but he distracted himself constantly and was always slipping and teetering on some brink. The basilisk appeared in his mind, like an epic waiting to be written, and then he couldn’t help himself. He told himself it was to distract the school, her brothers, anyone else who might be watching and provide a means for her eventual death but he suspected it was that itching need to do something, to see glory and greatness for what it truly was instead of its shadow.

He carried himself away and looking back that had always terrified him, how reckless he had been, but then had he been any more careful he likely would have never known her for what she truly was.

And in many ways he considered it necessary that he know Harriet Potter for more than the clever illusion she half-heartedly upheld.

She was called the girl who lived because when shot with the killing curse as infant her family slaughtered around her she had refused to die and instead had stolen the life of the Dark Lord Voldemort who had attempted to end her. She was spoken of in a hero worship that was almost absurd considering her age in the story and the fact that she did nothing but fail to die. Some part of him had resented that other Voldemort, the one who moved past him, securing his immortality by placing Tom in a notebook. However when he heard those words, so casually damned by an eleven year old girl writing in her diary, he had felt such helpless rage.

He could not even begin to guess why Lord Voldemort would attempt to murder children in the first place but that was secondary to the fact that he had been defeated by an infant.

In that first moment, of hearing little Ginny’s star filled praise, he vowed that he would find this Harry Potter and kill her slowly and painfully so that she might suffer for his humiliation and horror.

So in that first moment it was only a glimpse and a thought, “I will end you little girl.”

* * *

The first time he exchanged words with the girl was little better than the time he first glimpsed her, but it did remain in his memory later. It had been the beginning of the end of Ginevera Weasley and the girl was beginning to catch on. The black-outs were more frequent and the roosters’ blood would stain her hands in the morning, she’d wake staggering and confused in hallways late at night, and knew what it meant to be losing one’s mind.

He couldn’t say he hadn’t expected her to fight back but that didn’t mean he enjoyed it either. Ginny was trapped, she probably knew it too, too much of her soul was inside the notebook for her truly to be free of it. Tom had already won the war it was now simply a matter of starving her out. Still, it was only natural that she have one final act of rebellion.

He didn’t feel it, not directly, not the flooding of the overflowing toilet or anything physical like that. There was an aching chill as he felt her absence, that descent once again into the blank, into the emptiness that forever crawled into his mind.

In the midst of that Harry Potter appeared in the form of a single question, _“Hello?”_

He didn’t remember the specifics of their conversation, only the intent, to throw her off of Ginny and thus his own scent and to draw her in so that he could stare her in the face before they met one final time. A prelude, he had thought to himself, as enemies they should meet at least once before the true battle.

The moment she entered the realm of the diary he had known that something was off about her. He’d felt it, a surge of power, unlike anything he had felt with Ginny when she entered the notebook. It was as if there was light everywhere, rebounding off the walls of his existence, and then she stood before him dressed in a way he should have found ridiculous and yet couldn’t. She was in white but there were splashes of gold, red, and blue here and there found in her buckle, hair ties, and gloves. In her hand she held a broadsword inscribed with lilies that almost seemed to glow and her eyes again they seemed to know him exactly for what he was.

Horcrux, they seemed to say.

She did not look like a child in that moment, not at all.

“There was something you wanted to show me.” She said passing through the notebook as if it was mundane, something perfectly ordinary that she saw on a daily basis, and once the shock of her had receded he had found himself insulted.

This was one of the greatest of magical accomplishments, a human soul separated from the body yet still tangible, and she passed by it as if it was routine.

It just revitalized his conviction that Harry Potter must die. In those days he had not been prone to deeper thought, he had been so distracted by himself.

With a hand motion he’d let the scene play out and watched Harry’s unchanging reaction, those cool dead eyes that took in Hagrid’s framing as if they were nothing.

His only accurate thought on her that day was that perhaps, with ruthlessness like that, she did deserve to be in Slytherin after all.

* * *

What should have been the end game turned out to be only the beginning, he should have known that things were never that simple, but the diary had allowed him to forget the harsher aspects of reality.

As he had hoped she’d followed him into the Chamber of Secrets, having found the clues for herself and followed him down into the depths, it was better this way then chasing her down later. More dramatic, and really at this point wasn’t it the drama that counted?

“You’re late, girl who lived.”

She looked worn and yet strong in the same moment, curling hair pulled back away from her face with a tightness that spoke of necessity rather than style, her robes having been abandoned and the tie as well so that she was looking more like a Catholic school girl than a proper witch. Her wand was strapped into some kind of holster on her arm, not yet in her hand, and Tom remembered smirking at that amateur mistake, to not have her wand at the ready.

She did not smile, merely tilted her head and regarded him with narrowed eyes as if analyzing him, “A wizard is never late nor early but rather arrives precisely when he means to. You’re transparent, Mr. Riddle.”

He’d blinked at that, stumbled a bit, expecting something else he wasn’t sure what perhaps her running over to Ginny and demanding aid from him who had been so kind in the diary. Perhaps he had expected accusations anything besides this eerie calm, looking down at Ginny as if she was already dead.

“So I am, thank you dear Miss Potter, for pointing out the obvious. However, it isn’t my state of affairs I’d be worried about if I were you, haven’t you noticed the condition of Ginny Weasley? She’s not looking too good, is she?”

Again that tilted head, the eyes flicking down to Ginny’s prone form momentarily, before coming back up to his, “No, she isn’t. That’s very interesting though, very interesting.” The last bit was almost muttered, still looking at Tom, and for the first time looking unsure as if she couldn’t quite tell what she was looking at.

It was at this point that he decided to take over the conversation for her as she wasn’t heading in the right direction at all, “Yes, because you see even if you meant to arrive now you are a bit too late to help her. She’s doomed and now by arriving here you are as well, because while I might be Tom Marvolo Riddle I’m something else as well, care to guess?”

He didn’t give her a chance but instead rearranged the letters in the air for her. When they reached their final destination, I am Lord Voldemort, she did not move did not react in the slightest merely continued to stare.

“Well, do you not get it little girl? I am the dark lord, I am that being that murdered your parents and almost took this country. Aren’t you afraid? Aren’t you wondering how it is that I am that I am, that I exist in this diary? Aren’t you curious?” It was meant to be scathing but it was almost desperate, the things he shouted at her, and she did nothing merely stared coldly back.

Her response, after his shouts had faded and he was left panting and staring at her, the immovable object, “I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.”

He had planned to tell her something of his true nature, of what would become of Ginny, of all of it but those words had decided her fate for her. There were no other paths for her in that moment.

“Really, is that so?” He asked his lips twisting into a wolf’s grin, “Well then, girl who lived, let’s see if you can destroy something a bit bigger than last time. I believe you’ve heard my pet slinking through the walls and I hear he’s quite excited to meet you as well.”

He called and the basilisk came and in that instant the transformation began there was brilliant light and perhaps music as well, the chiming of distant bells, and then there she stood in white once again in that same outfit she had entered his diary in and the glowing white sword in her hand as if it weighed nothing at all.

It was like watching a shooting star, having more grace than any dancer or any bird, her feet propelling her forward without hesitation her eyes closed shut as if she was merely dreaming and yet there she was dancing to avoid the basilisk’s blows. It was almost over before it began, suddenly she was red and the sword was through the basilisk’s throat, she turned then to look at him stowing her sword in a scabbard over her shoulder and walking toward him with that same cool purpose with which she had approached him before. She looked like a worn but determined soldier who had fought through numerous trials and could not be halted by one more.

That was the first time he would have the thought that she was somehow less human than he himself managed to be.

“What are you?” He remembered whispering as he backed from her in his transparent half body, his eyes darting to the notebook hoping that she somehow didn’t make the connection that it was the notebook and not the body that she needed to strike.

She didn’t answer him, not then, but when she grabbed the notebook and flipped through the pages she did not destroy him either. At the time though everything was darkness and he felt himself blown out like a flickering candle.


	2. Chapter 2

After the Chamber of Secrets, Hogwarts, and Ginny Weasley he woke to find himself staring blankly up at a grey ceiling beneath a pile of blankets that seemed much too warm given the heat. Outside he could hear a few distant birds twittering along with the laughter of children, but inside the room there was only the sound of his own breathing. Without thinking he turned his head to survey the room and found himself looking sideways at Harry Potter.

He remembered her walking towards him, the steady fall of her footsteps, a constant interval that could not be deterred. Dressed in white she had seemed in that moment to represent Death than any grim reaper ever could. Her eyes, that green color the shade of the killing curse, had seemed so terribly empty then as if he hadn’t existed there at all.

She looked smaller now, dressed in brightly colored but cheap muggle clothing, a frayed secondhand green sweater and worn shorts. She seemed overwhelmed by her attributes as if her small pale body could not quite handle the weight of her curling hair, her eyes, or even her expression. She was curled on a chair in the corner, simply watching him, saying nothing even as he blinked back at her and wondered how he was to place her within his mind.

The girl who lived, he’d always cringed when Ginny had referred to Harriet Potter as that, as if she was something special somehow responsible for his other’s death when she had only been an infant. No, that baby had not been the girl who lived, it had been the girl who lived who’d slaughtered a basilisk and then turned those cold eyes to him.

Now they regarded each other, Tom bringing himself up into a sitting position, feeling weak and atrophied in this new somehow deliciously real body he was in. He had forgotten the world, inside the diary, and even cramped in this drab room beneath covers in what must be summer he felt wonderful. He felt, for the first time really, that life was somehow beautiful.

Sitting up he realized that he wasn’t wearing any clothes, however the girl had gotten him a body then it hadn’t been through the diary, as he’d been wearing his Hogwarts uniform in that transparent form. A girl her age would have blushed at the sight of the shirtless Tom Riddle in a bed, most likely her bed, staring back at her but she did nothing only held his gaze as if there was nothing out of the ordinary beyond his presence.

Finally she said, “You came back.”

He found his eyebrows lowering and a response on the tip of his tongue, I wasn’t aware I had gone anywhere, but he said nothing. He had decided somewhere between waking and this moment, that Harriet Potter wasn’t human, not in the way that most humans were human. There was something off about this girl, different, and until he knew what it was he wouldn’t unduly provoke her.

She lowered her knees until she was sitting in the chair normally, pale bare feet barely touching the floor, an awkward smile found its way onto her lips an expression she was clearly unfamiliar with, “I didn’t know if you would, it took a while to find you, and then when I called it was almost like you didn’t want to answer.”

It was clear that the girl wasn’t going to clarify what was going on, not without some input from Tom, and he was beginning to feel impatience in his ignorance. He could not sit naked in a bed forever after all.

“Who are you?” He repeated that final question from the Chamber, the one that seemed somehow more important than the others.

She looked surprised at first, as if she wasn’t quite sure why he was asking, “Harry  Potter,” She said at first but then she appeared to think about it a bit and a bitter smile stretched across her features, “Oh, right, that’s not what you mean.”

“No, it isn’t, Harry.” He said scathingly but she didn’t flinch at his tone or give any indication that she had heard him, instead she looked steadily down at her feet and sighed before looking up.

“I tried telling people, wizards and… witches, when I first went to Hogwarts. I thought everyone would know, because, well because they said they were magic. They’re not really magic though, they’re almost magic, and I guess that’s good enough for most things but… Do you know about witches Tom?” She asked those haunting green eyes staring into his intently.

“Female magic users, why yes I am aware.” He responded drily.

“No, witches Tom, I’m talking about witches.” With that stood from the chair and walked almost silently to the window where outside the blue sky could be seen overhead and a few green trees waved in the summer breeze.

“You see, even though I was raised by muggles, I knew about magic for a while. At first they were just accidental magic, the things that most people did, the Dursleys always hated that. They told me I was a freak, and well, I guess I am but that’s not really the point. For a while it was always things like that, disappearing onto the roof, talking to snakes… Kyubey came when I was nine and then...”

She trailed off, lost in some memory or another, leaving Tom to sit there and stare intently at her from the bed. Talking to snakes, she had said, as if it were a parlor trick. He had thought the same, snakes were never particularly interesting, but talking to snakes. There were no parseltongues left, with the defeat of his other only Tom should have remained, but talking to snakes.

For a horrifying minute he regarded her carefully, marked their similarities, and wondered again why the dark lord Voldemort would feel the need to massacre a family and kill their infant child. Pale sin, dark hair, delicate features, he marked them all and had the horrifying image of himself and a young Lily Evans locked away in some room. Parseltongue, she’d said, as if it meant nothing.

“Tom, if you could wish for anything, anything at all with no limits what would you wish for?” She asked suddenly turning from the window to look at him.

He didn’t have a response at the time, all he could do was stare at her, and think how horrifically similar they were at the end of things.

* * *

Her story came in fits and bursts, she seemed uncomfortable telling it, and even by the end of breakfast when she had aided him down the stairs and into an empty kitchen and proceeded to make a hurried but surprisingly homey breakfast he was certain he had not heard all of it.

She claimed that wizards and witches, the kind he knew about, weren’t real magic users.

“Sure they use magic, but they don’t really use it, I mean at first I thought it was the same thing but it’s not. They’re limited and they don’t even really know it.” She said with a smile that was almost apologetic as Tom’s expression had darkened. She used the word _they_ though, not _you_ , and he couldn’t help but wonder how he had been pulled out of that supposedly ignorant group.

There were only a few real magic users, and often times they were muggles, she called them magical girls. Only adolescent girls, she said, could become magical girls and of those only a few had the potential. In a large city like London there had been three of them and within magical Britain, as far as Harry was aware, there were only two.

Distracted by the food he’d made no comment; he’d forgotten the sensation of taste, so that even ordinary orange juice and slightly charred bacon seemed overwhelming. Not bad or good simply too much, he ate it anyway.

“To become a magical girl you have to make a contract with Kyubey, he’s um, he’s kind of like a magical cat I guess. In exchange for a wish, a wish about anything at all, he turns you into a magical girl.” After that small explanation she’d looked rather distant, looking away from him for a moment before turning back with a graver expression.

There was a price to the wish, and they were all made aware of it from the instant the contract was introduced. It was the duty of magical girls to fight witches, terrifying beings who hid in labyrinths, unseen to the normal eye who spread chaos and despair in their wake. Many of the unexplained suicides, murders, and cults were the cause of unseen witches according to the little girl.

You only got one wish, only one wish and then there was no turning back, so even when Kyubey had approached her she had known that she’d had to think long and hard about it.

“I was still living with the Dursleys then,” She said, as if that was supposed to mean something to him, “I thought I was thinking hard about it, and I knew that there was only one thing I really wanted, but I wasn’t really thinking about it and I didn’t even realize it. You shouldn’t use magic for other people, you should only use it for yourself, because terrible things happen if you don’t really mean it.”

“I,” Tom said with a sly and crooked smile, “have never had that particular issue.”

Oddly enough the girl smiled back, an innocent awkward smile, and once again he was struck with that horrified thought that they looked altogether too similar. There were times when she seemed like a little girl, when she let that cold mask of war drop from her face, but Harry Potter was always on edge.

She wouldn’t tell him what she wished for that day, only a vague half answer that he didn’t truly believe because he didn’t believe anything of her story anyway. On living by herself, alone in a house in the muggle suburbs she’d just shrugged and said that the Dursleys and her had stopped seeing eye to eye very soon after she had become a magical girl.

She ended their little breakfast, which seemed to be mostly for him than for her, with a summary of contemporary events while he was gone as she so eloquently put it, “There’s another magical girl in Hogwarts, I don’t know if you know her or not, Luna Lovegood. Anyway sometimes when you make a wish your magical abilities reflect on the wish you made, you can still do lots of other magic, everything a wizard or witch can do but you really specialize in that area. Luna asked about seeing things so she’s good at noticing certain details that others might overlook. Ginny had the potential to become a magical girl, Luna saw it, and when you took her down to the Chamber I couldn’t just let her die like that if she had another way out.” She trailed off here looking strained, that cheerful smile dropping from her face and leaving her looking old, finally she shook her head as if to clear bad thoughts and continued.

“Ginny’s at home now, Luna’s teaching her the basics, and when school rolls around again we’ll patrol Hogsmede, and Hogwarts. You’d be surprised how many witches wind up in Hogwarts, well I guess you wouldn’t because, I suppose the whole witch versus witch thing is rather confusing.”

Tom didn’t say anything, even as the girl stacked the dishes and appeared to end the conversation, he just kept looking and thinking and attempting to piece it all together. She had seemed more Slytherin at school, in her own home with him dressed in a man’s black work robes that she had managed to find in her closet she looked almost like a Hufflepuff, the best ones though were the ones that wore the faces of Hufflepuffs but had the eyes of Slytherins beneath it all.

* * *

She said that he could leave whenever he wished and he had a feeling this was more or less true, in spite of the flashes of memory to that moment in the Chamber he did not think that if he truly wished to leave this little girl could detain him, in spite of that he stayed.

There were several reasons for this action.

One was that he needed a place to regroup and lie low for a while, the diary, the basilisk, Ginny had turned into a catastrophe and only because of Harry Potter’s unknown schemes and whims was he even alive. If he truly wished to act, to retake his title and the wizarding world, he would have to think long and hard about his options and resources. Harry’s empty house was just as good a place to do that as any other, besides who would look for the memory of Tom Riddle in the home of the girl who lived?

There was also her, after the first week he still wasn’t sure what to make of her. For the most part she seemed like a normal girl, but then, she was trying very hard to seem like a normal girl. There were very large cracks in the mask she wore. She appeared to have no adult supervision and yet the house was filled with adult clothing, items, and various other objects that Harry seemed to have no interest in. She disappeared every night before Tom went to sleep and would often times return only after he had woken up looking worn, exhausted, and sometimes covered in wounds. When confronted by other children she often acted awkwardly as if she wasn’t quite sure what to make of them but with Tom she was quite content to play the role of the younger sister.

She was an enigma in every sense of the word and whenever he looked into those green eyes he couldn’t help but wonder why and how she had called to him and brought him back from the nothingness in the Chamber of Secrets. It would not do to forget that she was a Slytherin, whatever her true intentions she would not reveal her hand this early in the game.

The last reason was perhaps the most disturbing to him but it was the thought that resounded in his head whenever he first caught sight of her smile up at him as if the world was made of sunshine and birdsong. Bastard daughter, his bastard daughter, his other’s bastard daughter who spoke to snakes as if she was born to it and who’s family had been slaughtered by a dark lord for seemingly no explanation. Sometimes, looking down at her it was like looking at the twelve year old version of himself, all dark hair and pale skin.

It haunted him. To justify to himself that it had not happened, that it could not have happened, he needed to observe her to look at her and see anything but himself. Dark hair was a dominant trait, many people had pale skin, but parseltongue was rare and that worried him.

So he stayed in her empty house feeling as if he was playing doll, schemed and planned his takeover of the wizarding world at night when she was walking alone beneath the street lamps hunting for witches, and dissected her taking her apart piece by piece inside his mind until she was nothing more than her components.

Still, when she returned every morning, the circles under her eyes but a smile on her face nevertheless he knew that he had come no closer to understanding how she ticked than he had the day before.

And every day, as if on clockwork, she’d say, “Good morning sunshine, the Earth says hello. You really don’t sleep much, do you Tom?”


	3. Chapter 3

The first time he met the Incubator, Kyubey, was more than a bit odd. For one thing, it was before he knew the meaning of the word Incubator or had even heard the term.

It was early in the summer, when he still went out of his way to avoid Harry Potter and the idea of himself and Lily Evans, when he found himself in his head referring to her as Harry because she was more Harry Riddle than she would ever be Potter. He occupied his time by buying magical texts from Diagon and Knockturn Alley as well as researching the latest political happenings that Ginny had hinted at but not accurately managed to describe. He would see in her in passing, coming and going from the house, and in the morning when they sat together for breakfast but rarely more than was polite or necessary.

The idea of her existence unnerved him.

One day at the table he found Kyubey though, instead of Harry. It was an odd looking thing, as magical in appearance as any phoenix or gryphon, what was truly bizarre was how cute it looked. There really was no other word for it, it seemed almost engineered to draw the eye and soften the defenses, its coloring white and pink with large feathered ears like a rabbit and pink unblinking eyes. Had it not been moving, tilting its head to observe him, he might have mistaken it for a child’s toy.

It regarded him though in a manner that was familiar to him because it was the way that he and sometimes even Harry regarded others. It was a still analysis, a breaking down of parts from the eyes alone, without emotion or attachment only the pure thought.

Their little staring contest was broken up by Harry who walked in with a collection of glass pendants that seemed to be filled with shadows, she held them in the folds of her oversized sweater (red that day), and brought them over to the kitchen table where she laid each out with expert care. Tom felt his eye immediately drawn to them, not knowing quite what they were, but feeling resonance with them all the same as if he should know exactly what they were. On the table, in the morning light, they almost seemed to whisper to him.

“Oh, hi Tom, this is Kyubey he’s the one who granted my wish when I first became a magical girl. He stops by every once in a while, I don’t know if I told you that or not.” She said not looking at him but instead throwing one by one the pendants into the creatures back which became hollow and swallowed them whole. Inside the creature’s body there was nothing but black.

“The magical cat.” Tom said in a flat tone remembering the conversation.

Suddenly then there was a voice in his head, a childish voice that was not quite a child’s, somehow without even thinking on it he knew that it belonged to the creature.

“It’s strange that he can see and hear me, that’s a talent only potential magical girls have been known to possess, where did you find him Harry?”

“A diary.” Harry said with a smile as if the memory was a fond one rather than a confrontation with a basilisk and the death of Ginny Weasley, “Or, I guess it was almost a labyrinth, I don’t really know what it was. Have you heard of anything like this happening?”

The cat didn’t answer, simply continued to regard him for a few moments, and then blinking it turned to Harry instead and took up another topic of conversation. One different enough to throw the girl off and cause her think on her own actions rather than the fact that the course of the conversation had been deliberately changed and Tom found himself wondering at how well it had played her.

“You should be careful with how many witches you kill at once, Harry. If I’m not here to dispose of the grief seeds they’ll hatch again.”

Harry did not strike him as a person easily distracted or deterred, she certainly hadn’t been with Tom, and though he had not truly tried to find her secrets she was far more tight lipped than Ginny had ever been capable of. She was very canny, no matter the acts of normalcy she put on when she wasn’t a Slytherin, and it was very strange to see how a stray comment like that could remove her from the original line of questioning.

Harry nodded a faint blush lining her cheeks as if she too knew better but couldn’t quite help herself, “I know, it’s just, those new girls in London have no idea what they’re doing. It’s better if I just take care of the problem, besides, it’s good to have some on hand in case my soul gem needs cleaning. How’s Ginny doing?”

With the mention of Ginevera Weasley Tom felt his own mind snapping to attention, by all rights the girl should either have been dead, her soul ripped in half and lost in transition or trapped inside the notebook. He remembered Harry having said that Ginny had become a magical girl, a concept Harry had only vaguely explained and Tom was not quite certain he believed, but he had not truly been able to picture her as existing back outside the diary as if Tom had never touched her in the first place. Kyubey, however, did not seem alarmed or distressed by Ginny’s state of affairs but rather took it as if it was a completely reasonable question to ask.

“Ginny is adjusting, Luna as a veteran nearby to help is more than what most magical girls receive, she is acclimatizing to the results of her wish.”  

Harry nodded enthusiastically at this, something in her eyes softening in relief, “Good, that’s good, she’ll be okay. I should have done something sooner, it’s just…” Her eyes flicked to Tom and then flicked away, “Never mind, it’s done now, there’s no need to think on it.”

Tom wondered what she had censored herself from saying in that moment but he was unable to tell from the expression on her face alone. Judging by Harry’s initial speech on becoming a magical girl, as well as her state of exhaustion when she returned in the morning, it was not necessarily a kind fate that had been handed out to Ginny.

The cat said nothing to that standing and stretching once all the pendants, grief seeds, had been disposed of and staring at them both. It gave Harry one final parting look before wandering out the window, “Until later then, Harry.”

“That was interesting.” Tom noted when the creature had left. Harry for her own part looked a bit worn, as if talking with the thing had somehow exhausted her, or perhaps it was simply the news on Ginny had allowed her to release some pent up anxiety that had been building within her.

“Kyubey’s good, he grants people’s wishes, even if they aren’t always the right wishes and you have to pay for them he still makes miracles happen. I think that’s a good thing, and it’s always nice when he visits, people don’t really understand so it’s nice to have someone to talk to about everything.” She said these words as if she was trying to convince herself of these facts rather than him, they were too punctuated, too emotional to truly belong to her.

He had not considered the wish or even the magical girl aspect to her before Kyubey had visited, somehow though the creature’s visit made the concept more concrete and real to him, so that these mysterious wishes were more pertinent than they were before. Suddenly, looking at the girl in the scarlet sweater, lost inside of it he couldn’t help but feel that it was very important that he knew exactly what she had wished for.

“What did you wish for?” Tom asked, careful to keep a certain levity to his tone, a casual note that lulled the listener into complacency.

She did not look at him as she responded, did not stiffen, but rather appeared to grow lost at the words drifting off into the past where she was unreachable to creatures in the present.

“Something really stupid.” 

* * *

He dreamed of her as his daughter long before he accepted the fact in reality. She would stare across at him with those too green eyes and in the world of their dreams she would be as still as a clear pond on a Spring morning and in her he could only see himself. They were far too similar for comfort, that was the truth of the matter.

It went beyond Parseltongue, dark hair, pale skin, or even situations. She was her own person, certainly, but the essence of Tom Riddle clung to her like a shadow until he could not look at her without first seeing himself.

He tried to ignore it, between researching the state the wizarding world had driven itself into, soul magic, as well as anything else he thought might prove useful he spent the first part of that summer pretending as if she didn’t exist.

She wasn’t too offended by his actions, she’d return each morning, make breakfast for the pair of them and then inevitably wander off to take part in surprisingly mundane tasks and hobbies. She watched Saturday morning cartoons, she had a particular fascination almost obsession with the magical girl genre from Japan, she went grocery shopping at the muggle supermarket, and rarely she would insist Tom accompany her to places like the zoo or downtown London so that she would be seen as having suitable adult supervision.

In these public outings she’d hang onto his arm and smile up at him, as if he were a friend or an older brother, and people looking at them would smile and think what an attractive pair of siblings they made. These were the only times she came to him though, in the house she was much calmer and more distant, and always he felt something tugging inside him at these moments until he almost ached.

It became very clear, very quickly, that Harry had meant her words when she told him he was free to leave. He was not needed, not directly, and she made no pretense of detaining or otherwise keeping track of his activities. Sometimes he would catch her flipping through books brought to the house from Diagon Alley or Knockturn Alley but she rarely commented on their contents or why Tom felt he needed them.

When he asked she readily supplied funds for whatever he needed without asking what they might be used for. At one point, handing over galleons, he reminded her that he was a dark lord who had killed her parents as well as many other wizards. She had only looked at him then, something cold and dark flashing in her eyes, before stating in an almost emotionless tone, “I’m not a witch or a wizard.”

It seemed true, she belonged neither to the muggle world nor to the wizarding world, whatever this mysterious world of magical girls might be she belonged there far more than she did anywhere else. Perhaps that’s what made her so casual in funding him, whatever it was though, he always had to pause and think before asking her for money.

She was a very collected child, so much so that when she tried to be ordinary it seemed off and somehow ill-fitting, as if she could never quite manage childish eagerness and irresponsibility. Her face held many expressions but it was the grim look of determination and that careful thoughtfulness that he found most suited to it. She was most herself when leaving the house or else returning to it with blood stains on her clothing.

(Tom Riddle had never truly mastered the act of appearing happy, Dumbledore would attest to that readily enough.)

“We are the same,” She’d say in his dreams dressed in that white outfit glowing like a star, “We are the same you and I, shadows of each other, spread across time like light.”

It took him quite a while to work up the nerve to do the blood test not because he wasn’t already convinced but because he wanted there to be some margin of error.

Unsurprisingly the test had come back positive, as far as magic was concerned, they were very closely related.

He had never thought he’d have a child, when he’d entered the diary he had been sixteen and such thoughts hadn’t even occurred to him. His goal was immortality and with the horcrux (with another Tom in the diary) he had achieved it so why think on such things as heirs and legacy. The idea of progeny was alien to him and somewhat alarming, that there was someone like him, who carried a bit of himself inside her blood always set him on edge.

Like looking into a crooked mirror.

He tried to evaluate her then, to judge her worth against himself as a template. Is she worthy of me as my other relatives were so clearly not? Some part of him wanted to say no, that no one and nothing was worthy of him, but she had slaughtered a basilisk as if it was nothing more than Billy Stubb’s rabbit and he remembered that image. Even when ordinary, when in her guise of the twelve year old girl, she radiated power that made her hard to overlook.

There were times when he found himself distantly proud of her, content to sit at a table reading a book while she watched television or otherwise practiced wandless magic in another room. If anyone had to be his child, he’d think to himself, surely it would be so terrible if it was something as powerful and unexplained as the girl who lived.

Fatherhood did not come easy to him, he had grown beyond sixteen in the diary, stretched himself so thin until he did not feel human in the slightest but he still felt so young with the idea of a half-grown orphan bastard daughter thrust upon him.

It was a learned thing, a slow thing that showed itself in suggested books and tips on magic, on hesitant agreements to take her into the world both magical and muggle, and on gentle attempts to pry her secrets from her so that he might act on them and guard them as closely as she did. Tenderness, affection, were not things he had taught himself over the years.

Still, in time she seemed less stiff towards him, that battle in the Chamber of Secrets set aside for the moment and by the time the summer was half through she agreed to take him into London so that he might see a true witch for himself.


	4. Chapter 4

They had apparated from the house, Harry explaining that she had removed the trace wards as soon as they were installed and that apparating was a skill she considered necessary as soon as she had heard about its existence. She did not explain how, as an eleven year old girl, she had managed this nor did she consider it to be a grand feat of magic. It made Tom wonder if she wasn’t truly correct about the nature of magical girls being more magically talented than their peers; in Harry’s case at the very least this seemed to be true. From there they had begun stalking the streets of London, slowly but surely making their way to the east end, to the ghetto where Harry stated that witches liked to gather.

“They feed on things like despair, illness, and anger so you find them in places like this or else hospitals. Sometimes they show up normal places too, but if you want to start looking then these are good places to start.”

As they walked through the streets the prostitutes and homeless men leered at her and at Tom, he walked close behind glaring at those who attempted to approach, but Harry seemed to take no notice of them as she walked forward staring instead at the glowing red light in her hand. She walked as if she belonged in this world of wretched beings.

They walked for quite some time, regardless of dark alleyways and missing streetlamps and Tom couldn’t help but think that even the orphanage had been less decrepit than these places. This was where the true street rats lived, a place Tom had never ventured in his youth, and her ease with the place was causing him some discomfort.

He didn’t like the idea that his daughter, that word still so foreign and strange on his tongue, was so comfortable in places like these.

He had said nothing during this time she had seemed so distant and very focused, this was Harry at work, not the Harry in the house or even the Harry in public and she was not to be touched. He knew that air, he’d worn it so very often himself, and there had seemed nothing worth saying anyway.

Eventually they stopped before a dark alleyway, the sounds of a woman sobbing inside a nearby building, of the thuds of fists and the loud grunts of a male voice. She did not turn to look at the sound of violence though, instead she stared straight ahead into the dark. He stared as well, at first there were only shadows, but then it flickered. It seemed as if reality warped in on itself until the shadow was more than simply shadow, there were lights dancing inside it, fuzzy edges that lent it a sense of unreality of wrongness he couldn’t quite express.

It reminded him of the diary, of that terrible emptiness, and himself trapped screaming soundlessly inside it.

“It’s a labyrinth.” She said quietly, answering his unvoiced question and began with a brilliant flash of light, of colors dancing and red butterflies fluttering in the air she transformed into that other self she had been in the Chamber of Secrets, the magical girl.

Broadsword in her right hand she stalked towards the entrance without hesitation, he grabbed at the white cloak and held her back, his eyes still locked on the hole in reality, “Harry…”

She turned back and smiled at him, prying his hand away from her with soft pale hands enclosed in golden gloves, “It’s okay, Tom, this is what I do.”

With that, still holding onto his hand, she walked them both into the darkness leaving London far behind.

* * *

It was not a place, it was a thought, it was delirium and madness. A true labyrinth is not a labyrinth at all, there is no maze, there is no center, there is no turning left until you exit there is only the shifting of time and space until you are stretched thin beyond your sense of being. Labyrinth as he had understood it was not the true word, it had been watered down by his people, misrepresented until it contained only petty beasts like minotaurs. Plato’s shadows on the cave wall had never seemed more relevant or apt.

Labyrinths and labyrinths, she had said, witches and witches.

In the dark shifting tunnel, light bursting in and out of existence, their shadows stretched and curved and their images warped and cartooned, his Virgil in white led him further down into the cold inferno. There is no simple leaving, she said, once you are in you will never get out, to leave you must find the center you must find the witch.

And always he found himself thinking of the notebook, of himself trapped in that hell of his own making again, where there had only been himself and his own sanity dripping down the white walls.

“Tom.” He heard distantly, green eyes staring back at him, somehow impossibly still bright and real inside this fake world, “Tom, come on.”

She held his hand, squeezed it in one of hers, and lead them onwards, “It’s okay,” She said not saying why he should be reassured, “Don’t worry, we’re almost there.”

And then suddenly, the walls rushing towards them at an alarming pace, they were. Suddenly there it was whatever it was. It had no true form, even Tom could see that, rather it was this shifting mass that stared out with no eyes.

“What is that thing?”

She didn’t answer, instead she let go on his head, left him to reel backwards and simply stare at it with an open mouth. She was dancing beyond him, that white star in the abyss, and it was chasing after her. Swords appeared out of nothingness and were flung into the beast causing it to let loose a great cry.

His eyes drifted from it to the floor of the cavern and he found two girls, dressed in bright colored dresses, with frills and bows seeming so terribly out of place and yet more in place than Tom in his borrowed muggle clothing could ever be. They held onto each other, these plain, and yet somehow glittering girls with terror in their eyes and abandoned weapons by their sides.

Soon enough the neck of the thing was off, it collapsed, and with it the world began to flicker until they were once more in an alley way and Harry was standing placing a smoke filled pendent into her pocket.

She didn’t turn to Tom then but rather to the two girls still shaking and clutching each other on the ground, “You girls are going to get yourselves killed.”

Suddenly they were all in normal clothing, Harry looking so plainly out of place in her green sweater and frayed shorts, and the other two looking as if they had just walked home from school.

One of the girls seemed to conquer her fear of the beast and flushed at Harry’s words and shouted back at her, “We didn’t ask for your help, and we didn’t need it either. We’re magical girls too! Just like you!”

Harry’s eyes narrowed and she approached the girl and pushed her back onto the ground with her friend, “I am not like you. Get your act together and don’t waste my time because next time I won’t be coming to save your asses like some prince charming.”

The girls both scrambled to their feet, resentment in each of their eyes as they looked at her, “Like you even care about these people, like you even care what these witches are doing to them, just in it for the grief seeds… You’re just a reaper not anyone’s knight in shining armor. I never see you killing a familiar!”

The second more timid one tugged on her friend’s shoulder, “Come on, Emily, let’s just go.”

“No,” Emily said, “I’m not done yet!”

“Know your limits or else you won’t be killing anything, familiar or witch.” Harry said, her eyes like ice as she surveyed them, looking all too much like that girl in the Chamber of Secrets. Suddenly she tossed the pendent, the grief seed, at the two girls, “Go home.”

The girl threw the grief seed back at Harry’s feet, “We don’t need your pity.”

The girl’s eyes flickered to Tom, “Who’s that, your boyfriend? Think he’s impressed by dates in dark alleyways?”

Harry’s eyes narrowed slightly and she moved closer to Tom, stepping in front of him, as if to cut off the other girl’s access to him, “Tom’s just here to see the sights, that’s not really your business, is it?”

“Come on, Emily!” The other girl said pulling now with more desperation on Emily's arm but Emily was slowly drifting back into that magical girl’s costume and Harry was as well.

“I think it was pretty stupid to bring him along for the ride.”

Harry didn’t say anything, merely drew her sword from the holster on her back, and placed her feet shoulder width apart with the sword brought up before her eyes and facing the girl Emily. Emily, for  her own part, brought out a smaller thinner looking blade with a grin that was almost crazed.

Before Tom could blink the other girl was in motion and almost as swiftly it was done.

* * *

They sat in the alley after it was all over, the other girl having run off home already her friend’s battered body draped over her shoulders, looking at Harry with almost as much fear as she had looked at the witch in the labyrinth. Harry for her own part said nothing, she just stared ahead at the dark wall of the alley, and they listened to the sounds of the urban night.

“What do you think?” She finally asked, distantly, as if it was a stray thought that had escaped through her mouth.

Think, what a foreign concept, thinking was past him at the moment. There was only brick walls and shadows now, “Does that happen often?”

Harry nodded with a sigh her arms wrapping around her knees as she stared glumly ahead not even glancing at Tom, “Well, that is what I do, kill witches.”

She said it with as much certainty, no with more certainty, than he had proclaimed that he was Voldemort. It was a flat statement but one that brooked no argument and he couldn’t help but wonder how many witches she had slaughtered, she had been nine when Kyubey came to her she said, she was now almost thirteen that was a long time to be hunting the things that went bump in the night.

He felt that he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to know, it was evident enough already, she waded in bloodshed as if it was light rain annoying but hardly unreasonable. It was a small wonder she had viewed a basilisk as little more than a pest.

“Those other girls, they were magical girls too?” He asked and again she nodded again looking more fatigued than anything else, turning her head slightly to look him in the eyes with that same worn expression.

“They’re new, only been at it for a few months... A city the size of London can really only support a couple of magical girls at a time, I’ve been here the longest, I guess that makes me a veteran but every once in a while girls like that pop up. Probably were best friends in middle school, I don’t know what they wished for but judging by the way they act now they didn’t really think it through. Some girls just do it to be a magical girl, to protect the world and fight witches, and the wish is just a bonus… They never last long when they think like that.”

“What happens to them?”

She didn’t say anything for a bit just continued to look at him before shrugging, “They take on something they can’t handle. I’ve seen girls get eaten by witches, get killed by other magical girls, and sometimes they just disappear like they never existed in the first place.”

Again looking at her, half lit in the darkness, he wondered if he wasn’t staring at a young Tom Riddle instead. One who looked at others around him and found them to be alien, to be different, and to be altogether disappointing. She continued either ignoring or not noticing his staring, “They get caught up in the duty, the obligation, the morals of it all and get it into their heads that they’re protecting people and making the world a better place. It’s the ones who think like that, who have friends, who always get themselves killed.”

The way she spoke of them it was as if they were already dead and yet Tom couldn’t help but notice that she had come to their aid that night and offered advice no matter how cruelly it had been presented. Harry, whatever she might be, was not as heartless as she made herself out to be and he couldn’t help but wonder at that.

“It sounds like you’re describing Gryffindor.” Tom said with a wry grin to which Harry looked at him a little stunned by the observation.

“I guess so…” She said musingly, “You know, I never thought about Gryffindor like that. Bravery is fine, you need it for things like witches and basilisks… I guess you’re right though, girls like that would be in Gryffindor.”

She shrugged then and stood brushing off her pants and giving a hand to him, “We should probably get going, I’m pretty tired and it’s never good to go witch hunting when you’re tired.”


	5. Chapter 5

The rest of that night was spent sleepless at the kitchen table, a kettle filled with tea placed before them both, and the clock ticking in the background.

It seemed their act of playing house had momentarily ended, of course he had not realized they were playing house, or rather that she was playing house. That’s what it seemed though, an empty doll house, filled with furnishings she did not need and a sense of normality that could otherwise not be found in London amidst the junkies and the witches. Her witches, not his, never his.

It had seemed odd, a little off and perhaps a bit surreal, but at that moment it was more unnerving than he had ever found it before.

Just where had Harry Potter found this house empty of people but filled with furnishings? Or had she found it empty at all? What had Dumbledore and his cronies made of it, of her, their messiah with too green of eyes playing family with no one to point to as a father or a mother?

Magical girl, witches, labyrinths, these were not her true secrets. They were only secret in that no one believed them, no one looked for them, and so they became her secrets by default but she had other deeper secrets that he had not yet even glimpsed.

A father should know his own progeny, half of her was him, and yet while he saw himself so clearly in her he only saw the image and nothing behind it. The glass which made that reflection was obscured so that he could only glimpse himself.

In the end it was him who broke the silence, “So these witches are in the magical world as well?”

Harry started; she had been lost in her own thoughts for some time, staring into the walls as if they contained all the stories in the world, “Yes, as far as I can tell wizards are mostly unaware of them though.”

“Mostly?”

“Dementors,” She said quietly in a voice that was still distracted, “Are probably familiars, too weak to create a labyrinth, too small to disguise themselves properly. I’ve never seen one in person so it’s hard to tell but from the description… Well, they do sound a bit familiar.”

She smiled briefly at her own pun before sipping at her tea with that lost expression, “Magic, as wizards know it, is a watered down version of what we use. They seem satisfied with it, for the most part anyway.”

She stopped then allowing the silence to grow once more, not clarifying her words in the slightest, and perhaps she merely lacked the experience. She had only been in the magical world for two years, first and second year spells would seem like child’s play to her (they had been to him), but all the same it was disquieting to think that she saw so little in them. Then again, with the image of her battling in his mind, how could he disagree?

With that speed, that raw power, she would have an auror on their knees within seconds. There was something to be said for that.

“How many witches do you typically kill while at Hogwarts?” It was the first time he had so bluntly asked about her occupation, and in her attention, how she set down her tea and turned to him with a cold glance it showed.

It seemed she had preferred it when he hadn’t really believed, when he had allowed her to act as she would but didn’t really believe, or rather didn’t truly know. She had liked it when he thought witches, her witches, were these silly little things that any competent wizard could handle if they existed at all.  

Or perhaps it was how he said it, killed, in the manner that she did. There really was no getting around it though, and perhaps that was why she didn’t respond directly even as she glared, she killed witches in the night. No, killing was too weak a word, she slaughtered them like cattle.

“Not too many, Hogsmeade is small, and Hogwarts is even smaller, that being said Hogwarts is a surprisingly violent and angry place… As you may have noted so things do turn up every once in a while. You know, when I first met you, I thought you were a witch.”

Her eyes seemed to bore through him, dissect him, as if he was some lab specimen on a table and once again he found himself wondering why he was here and why he was still alive. He had been at her mercy, more than at her mercy, in the Chamber of Secrets and yet here they were playing house as if none of it had ever happened.

She allowed him to incite revolution, to research what exactly his other self had been doing for fifty years, to get his grips on reality but that was just it she allowed him to do it. Had she truly been what he had been expecting, a girl vengeful over the death of her parents, he would have been dead long ago.

“You felt like a witch, the notebook felt like a labyrinth, but at the same time…” She paused as if searching for the right thought and then said, “Witches don’t talk, can’t talk, I have never heard one speak. They’re mindless beings filled with anger and chaos, they just destroy, and kill that’s all they do. You were angry, you brought about feelings of despair and rage, you brought death and blood to Hogwarts’ doorstep but you weren’t mindless. Witches don’t take human form and they don’t talk.”

So it seemed the other shoe had dropped, at the cold look in her eyes he realized the jig was up for both of them, it seemed they would come to the true motives of things at last. Now that they had gotten to know each other a little better, “Is that why I’m here, for your curiosity?”

“I guess, partly, there are other reasons.” Placing her fingers together she paused and finally said, “You aren’t human but you’re not a magical girl, a witch, or even a familiar.”

“No, I’m not.” He said coldly, “But then, you aren’t really human either.”

“No, I guess I’m not.”

Only a little while after that she left the table, done with their conversation and drifting off into her bedroom, leaving Tom behind with tea and thoughts swirling in his head.

* * *

Tense was too strong a word for the weeks that followed. In the morning Harry returned to her more usual demeanor, that casual child’s act that she liked to put on her for herself, and it seemed that the conversation and the events of that night had been more or less put aside.

There had always been hints that she had suspected him of being something other than human but they had only ever been hints and in attempting to reclaim Voldemort and discover her biological relation to him it had seemed unimportant. Whatever webs she wove she was only twelve years old, a child, and there was no doubt that he could leave if need be.

He still felt that he could leave, that her offer had been genuine, but leaving no longer seemed to matter. In discovering something of her true nature, in what it truly meant to be a magical girl, he realized that if she needed to find him she would and it was as simple as that.

She knew he was a horcrux, as he had initially suspected but disregarded in the notebook, she simply didn’t have the word for it. Being a horcrux, rather than a wizard or even a dark lord, had been what had saved him in the Chamber of Secrets. He wasn’t quite certain what to make of that.

What would a young Tom Riddle, a Tom Riddle who lived in a surreal world in which he battled nightly for the equivalent of a food supply, what would he do with a manner of creature that was not quite human?

Still, she made no move, and so things settled into what they had been before. He found his way to the couch and watched her magical girl shows with her, the Japanese imports featuring young girls in fashionable outfits and as they watched she routinely had commentary.

“That’s the most unrealistic part.” She said one day staring at the screen with dull eyes.

“Hm?”

She pointed, the animated girls on the screen were hugging each other and laughing in relief at the defeat of an enemy, “The friendships, magical girls don’t have friends. It becomes too hard to relate to normal people, next to them you feel old and tired and covered in blood, and as for other magical girls… Well, that never works out well.”

He noted then, staring at her face, that contemplative frown that she had not included him in either of those categories. He was not a human but he also wasn’t a magical girl and for a surreal moment he wondered if it hadn’t been as simple as that.

There had been a time, when he was young and weak, before Hogwarts and bitterness had set in. That he had wondered if there wasn’t someone out there that he could relate to, some mentor or peer, that would not be as extraordinary as him but would be vaguely similar.

He had little faith in humans and later in wizards but if he had come across some third unknown category of being; well who’s to say he wouldn’t have tried as well?

Still she had secrets, more secrets than he would have suspected even from the girl who lived, she was almost drowning in her secrets.

There were still photographs on the wall, ones that he had overlooked before as they had seemed unimportant, but now he found himself staring at each and storing each image in his memory. Many were of Harry herself, a younger Harry, smaller and thinner but remarkably happier. There was no edge in her eyes as there was now, and her grin seemed real, without shadows inside it.

(On finding those, on seeing that bright smile, it had hurt for a moment in a way he couldn’t really describe. That he had never seen her that happy, appeared to be incapable of bringing that expression to her face, in spite of the fact the he was her true father.)

Here she was in the park, there outside of muggle school, always with that bright smile as if the world was made of miracles.

There were no recent pictures of her, none of her in wizarding attire, only that age that golden age that looked as if it was only a few years before.

Most were of Harry, this young strange Harry he didn’t know, but there were others as well. One, cut off at the edges as if someone had been cut of the frame, featured two young attractive people blinking back at him in a wizard’s photograph. A young woman with red hair and green eyes and a young man with glasses; smiling at the camera with expressions that only seemed happy, their eyes were vacant.

Even looking at them, their images in a photograph, they were filled with nothingness; fake somehow.

The photos that weren’t of Harry were hard to find, the ones of herself she seemed to disregard, to casually dismiss until she forgot their presence entirely but these ones she had searched out and had mutilated with scissors; condemned them to shadowed corners where they couldn’t truly be seen.

Looking at the adult clothing and at James and Lily Potter’s frames it seemed as if the clothes, both the muggle and the wizard clothes, would have fit.

Of course without measurements it was impossible to tell but all the same he couldn’t help but connect the dots with a fragile line inside his mind. No true conclusion drawn, no explanation, but a connection.

The key was in Harry’s past, in how she came to live in an empty house filled only with furniture, clothing, and nostalgia. 

“You mentioned you used to live with your relatives, the Dursleys.”

It had been one morning when she had gotten back from witch hunting, exhausted and on the cusp of sleep, dark shadows etched beneath her eyes as she gratefully took the tea he handed her. He had not gone himself, there was no longer a reason to risk his neck, now that he knew that there truly was a difference between Harry’s witches and his own he saw no reason to see one in the flesh again.  

Instead he waited for her to get back, before he went off to Knockturn Alley for connections or research, and had tea waiting.

“Surprised you remembered that.” She muttered, as if she would have preferred for that to be the case, “Yeah, I lived with them for a while. They never really liked me, of course.”

There were many things left unsaid in that, darker memories, but Tom had no true interest in those. He had his own memories of the orphanage to fill in the blanks, he knew exactly what ignorant muggles could be like to gifted individuals, it would be no different for his daughter than it was for him.

“I’m just surprised that you aren’t still with them, you see the state doesn’t usually take kindly to young girls living by themselves.” His eyes flickered over to hers, to see if she stiffened or otherwise bristled, but she seemed as if she was still thinking over her distasteful relatives rather than anything else.

She shrugged, “When I became a magical girl, well it took freaky business to a whole new level.” She snorted here as if this was a particularly witty statement before continuing, “Besides, I thought I’d…”

Solved it, he wanted to complete for her, she had thought that she had solved the problem. She didn’t finish though, instead she trailed off, her frown increasing as an even darker memory worked itself to the surface in her head.

“Your wish?” He’d asked and here she did stiffen and looked over at him, her eyes like knives, but she nodded all the same.

“Yeah, my great wish.” She said a cold smile painting her lips, the one he remembered wearing with his father’s corpse on the floor before him, a bleak smile.

“Do I ever get to hear what this great wish was?”

She was silent for a few moments and in that silence he could feel the room growing colder until it seemed as if the air itself was frozen, finally in a voice he had only heard from her a few times, the voice of the girl in the Chamber of Secrets and the alleyway she said, “Don’t ever ask a magical girl about her wish.”

Looking through him, those eyes far too green for any normal girl, she continued, “How’d you end up a notebook, Tom?”

Personal, too personal, “Ah, I see.”

In the tense silence they had waited, sipping their tea, and finally she broke the silence returning to the original topic of her relatives, “I wouldn’t go back, even if they’d take me, even if they wanted me to I would never go back. Besides, a lot of magical girls end up living on their own anyway, I just started a bit sooner than most.”

Had he had a way out of the orphanage, even at the tender age of nine or ten, he would have done the same; that much he understood. In some ways even the diary, condemned to his own head and consciousness for fifty years, was preferable to that damned orphanage.

Harry had secrets like being a magical girl and killing witches, secrets she barely kept that wizards and others merely refused to look directly at, but she had other secrets too. And they danced in the shadows of her eyes even as she watched television filled with animated cheerful girls surrounded by friends battling monsters.

**Author's Note:**

> I usually like to have some excuse for swapping genders, and here it's to play better by P3M's set of stated rules. At any rate this fic is quite old so I actually don't expect to update it. However, it's not complete so I won't mark it as such and will port it over from fanfiction since I'm doing that with everything.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


End file.
